Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine. and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?”

— Matt Haig

352. “So, as was often the case, a big fear was beaten by a bigger fear. The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one.”

— Matt Haig

353. “I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright.”

— Matt Haig

354. “The sense of being physically empty, of dissolving, of being a ghost whose existence was sourced by electric anxiety. And it became hard to breathe. The air thinned. It took massive concentration just to keep control of my breathing.”

— Matt Haig

355. “I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.”

— Matt Haig

356. “The past is never gone. It just hides.”

— Matt Haig

357. “There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.”

— Matt Haig

358. “The quiet made her realize how much noise there was elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning. You heard something and you had to pay attention.”

— Matt Haig

359. “It is better to be a sad poem than a blank page.”

— Matt Haig

360. “I’ve let people down. I haven’t always been easy. I’ve done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don’t entirely blame them.”

— Matt Haig

361. “The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same.”

— Matt Haig

362. “Travel makes one modest” said Gustave Flaubert. “You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Such a perspective can be liberating. Especially when you have an illness that may on one hand lower self-esteem but on the other intensifies the trivial.”

— Matt Haig

363. “The hardest dream of all is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.”

— Matt Haig

364. “You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve,-.”

— Matt Haig

365. “Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.”

— Matt Haig

366. “Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions.”

— Matt Haig

367. “Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”

— Matt Haig

368. “It’ hard to explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.”

— Matt Haig

369. “We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything. Invisible sharks One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it.”

— Matt Haig

370. “From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.”

— Matt Haig

371. “She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.”

— Matt Haig

372. “Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.”

— Matt Haig

373. “Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.”

— Matt Haig

374. “Kindness is a boomerang. You throw it out and you get it back. You had done kind things in the world, and you had been rewarded with kindness in return.”

— Matt Haig

375. “Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.”

— Matt Haig

376. “Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”

— Matt Haig

377. “People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It’s just that we can’t rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out.”

— Matt Haig

378. “I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.”

— Matt Haig

379. “On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.”

— Matt Haig

380. “Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

— Matt Haig

381. “A kiss,′ she said, ’is like music. It stops time...”

— Matt Haig

382. “So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

383. “Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and Short. Paragraphs. Light was everything. But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.”

— Matt Haig

384. “The art of swimming... was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.”

— Matt Haig

385. “If pills work for you it doesn’t really matter if this is to do with serotonin or another process or anything else.- keep taking them. Hell, if licking wallpaper does it for you, do that. I am not anti pill. I am pro anything that works and I know pill do work for a lot of people.”

— Matt Haig

386. “Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ’on the other side of despair.”

— Matt Haig

387. “I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open.”

— Matt Haig

388. “And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.”

— Matt Haig

389. “The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.”

— Matt Haig

390. “To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.”

— Matt Haig

391. “Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to’, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.”

— Matt Haig

392. “Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.”

— Matt Haig

393. “He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things “one day at a time,” as if there were another way for days to be experienced.”

— Matt Haig

394. “Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.”

— Matt Haig

395. “She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’ ‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?”

— Matt Haig

396. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.”

— Matt Haig

397. “The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature... solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

— Matt Haig

398. “Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.”

— Matt Haig

399. “Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.”

— Matt Haig

400. “Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.”

— Matt Haig